Output details

A qualitative enquiry into OpenStreetMap making

This peer-reviewed journal article considers open data and participatory media by investigating the socio-technical practices and dynamics within a Voluntary Geographical Information (VGI) innovation system. Based on a case study on OpenStreetMap, an open source project that crowd-sources geographical data and geographical information, the paper provides a contextual and embodied understanding of the user-led, user-participatory and user-generated produsage phenomenon. It employs Grounded Theory, Social Worlds Theory, and qualitative methods to illuminate and explore the produsage processes of OpenStreetMap making, and to investigate how knowledge artefacts such as maps can be collectively and collaboratively produced by a community of people who are situated in different places around the world but engaged with the same repertoire of mapping practices.

The empirical data illustrate that OpenStreetMap itself acts as a boundary object that enables actors from different social worlds to co-produce the Map through interacting with each other and negotiating the meanings of mapping, the mapping data and the Map itself. The discourses also show that unlike traditional maps, which black-box cartographic knowledge to produce a single dominant perspective of cities or places, OpenStreetMap is an embodied epistemic object that embraces different world views. The paper also explores how contributors build their identities as OpenStreetMappers alongside some of the other identities they have. Understanding the identity-building process helps to understand mapping as an embodied activity with emotional, cognitive and social repertoires.

This research has led to a collaborative project with the Institute of Geoinformation and Cartography at Vienna University of Technology (TU-Wien), and Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft in Austria: the Fostering the participation of women in Voluntary Geographical Information – encouraging FEMales to MAP (Fem2Map) project, funded by the Austrian Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT) under the structural research programme FEMtech-fFORTE. http://cartography.tuwien.ac.at/fem2map/